"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith.
Liz Cheney takes umbrage at a comment from Robert Gibbs:
CHENEY: You’ve also have Robert Gibbs this week, when asked what does it mean if 71 percent of the people in Missouri said they don’t want any mandate for health insurance, he said, “it means nothing.” Now when you have a White House that is that unwilling to listen to what people out there are saying, I think, you know, it causes some real concern about whether or not they are actually going to be responsive to the voters.
Was there ever a Republican who refused to listen to the voters? Oh, yeah, there was this guy:
MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC): Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.
DICK CHENEY: So?
RADDATZ So? You don’t care what the American people think?
CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.
Then Cheney actually had the nerve to say this:
“You have the President saying you can’t have the keys back like he’s the decider.”
No wonder this incensed her, because we all know who the decider was.
"I'm the decider and I decide what is best..."
I don't remember Liz Cheney being outraged when her father and Bush made those comments.
Only Liz Cheney could agree that McChrystal had to be fired, agree with the choice of Petraeus to replace him, and yet still doubt that Obama "is all in" when it comes to Afghanistan.
Liz Cheney, one of the foulest people on the American airwaves, now states that Obama "thinks that saying something makes it so".
As Crooks and Liars rightly points out, this is especially rich coming from the daughter of a man who made the following statements.
"I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." -- on the Iraq insurgency, June 20, 2005
and this:
"We know he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." --March 16, 2003
and this:
"My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." --March 16, 2003
and this:
"There are a lot of lessons we want to learn out of this process in terms of what works. I think we are in fact on our way to getting on top of the whole Katrina exercise." --Sept. 10, 2005
Yeah, Lizzie, Obama's the guy who thinks that saying something makes it so....
In his New York Times column today, Ross Douthat laments the lack of real political debates on cable news shows, and writes this:
What might work, instead, is a cable news network devoted to actual debate. For all the red-faced shouting, debate isn’t really what you get on Fox and MSNBC. Hannity has ditched Colmes, and conservatives are only invited on Rachel Maddow’s show when they have something nasty to say about Republicans.
Here we find two of the most common pundit afflictions: (1) a compulsion to assert equivalencies even when they don't exist, and (2) a willingness to spout anything without doing the slightest work to find out if it's true. Douthat's claim about Maddow -- that "conservatives are only invited on [her] show when they have something nasty to say about Republicans" -- is completely false.
The real problem is not that Maddow fails to invite conservatives on her show; she does exactly that relentlessly. The problem is that most leading conservatives refuse to be interviewed by anyone -- such as Maddow -- who will conduct adversarial interviews. They thus restrict themselves to the friendly confines of Fox News or to television interview shows where the hosts refuse to question them aggressively due to a fear of being perceived as something other than "neutral."
If Maddow is telling the truth, and I have no reason to doubt her, she constantly asks Republicans to appear on her show and they always refuse. Liz Cheney has been asked several times to appear on Maddow's show and she never responds.
As I've said many, many times before, our booking producers have repeatedly called Liz Cheney and invited her to be a guest on this show. To, as they say, debate the issues. We called her again today and, as usual, got no response. Why doesn't Liz Cheney want to debate the issues?
It really shouldn't surprise anyone that the Republicans don't want to go on to Maddow's show, as much of the scaremongering the Republicans are engaging in is based on blatant untruths.
Only on Fox - in front of an O'Reilly, Hannity or Beck - could anyone seriously argue about "death panels" and the other nonsense which the Republicans came out with to oppose the healthcare bill.
Because Fox are literally creating an alternate reality. A place where facts do not matter so much as opinion. A place where supporters of Ronald Reagan can condemn Obama as "inviting attack" on American soil when he implements policies which Reagan supported.
And, so successful are they at this, that Fox viewers are more inclined than others to believe things which are demonstrably untrue:
On Health Care Reform, Those Who Believe That It Will…
MSNBC/CNN Viewers
Fox News Viewers
Give Coverage To Illegal Immigrants:
41%
72%
Lead To A Government Takeover:
39%
79%
Pay For Abortions:
40%
69%
Stop Care To The Elderly:
30%
75%
To search for an equivalence between Fox and other news channels strikes me as ludicrous. There was a reason why Dick Cheney did so many interviews with them, just as there is a reason that his daughter avoids Rachel Maddow like the plague.
This was the statement put out by the despicable Liz Cheney, insisting that the CIA must continue to have the right to torture people:
"Late last night, Democrats in the House of Representatives inserted a provision dubbed “The Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Interrogation Act of 2010” into the intelligence authorization bill. This new language targets the US intelligence community with criminal penalties for using methods they have deemed necessary for keeping America safe. These methods have further been found by the Department of Justice to be both legal and in keeping with our international obligations.
"American intelligence officers do not deserve this kind of treatment from the government they honorably serve. Day in and day out, they protect our country and make difficult decisions–at times in matters of life and death. In return for their service the government rewards them with little pay and no acknowledgement of their heroic actions. Democrats in Congress now want to threaten them with criminal prosecutions and deprive them of valuable tactics that protect America.
"We urge the Congress to vote against the intelligence authorization bill in its current form."
Liz Cheney Chairman Keep America Safe
Cheney has always claimed that the US will suffer should these methods be outlawed.
The woman is an utter abomination as far as I am concerned. And, much more importantly, Michael Sulick, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, recently stated that the U.S. hasn’t “suffered at all” because of the decision to ban waterboarding:
Sulick followed his lecture with a lengthy question-and-answer session, although he prefaced it by saying he would not comment on any issue that might influence policy. Questions were submitted by Fordham students in advance and read aloud by USG members. When asked if the Obama administration’s ban on waterboarding has had serious consequences on the war against terror, Sulick answered in general terms.
“I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint,” he said, “but I don’t want to talk about [it from] a legal, moral or ethical standpoint.”
It's no surprise that Liz Cheney is found, as usual, to be talking utter nonsense. But then, she has to pretend that waterboarding was highly effective, as it's the only excuse she can come up with to explain her father's dreadful, illegal, behaviour.
One of the greatest disappointments I have with the Obama administration is that the sick buggers who authorised torture, like Liz Cheney's father, have never been prosecuted.
As far as I am concerned that remains a stain on America's conscience.
David Brooks compares Liz Cheney's attack on lawyers defending suspected terrorists to the names which were hurled at her father when he was Vice President and he asks that we consider this part of "the emotional content".
It's pointed out to him that these lawyers were not running for national office, where such attacks are to be expected, they were simply doing their jobs. And, whilst I was utterly against Dick Cheney's policies and his world view, I don't think anyone ever accused him of possibly sharing al Qaeda's values, which is exactly the implication his daughter heaped upon those lawyers.
Where Brooks imagines there is any comparison between the two is quite baffling to me.
He also claimed this:
I mean, it's just part of a long range of corrosive language. And, to be fair to Liz Cheney, if you Google Taliban and Liz Cheney, millions of people have called her a member of the Taliban and made similar charges.
I Googled it. I could find no evidence to support this claim. Try it and see how you get on.
Amy Holmes attempts to find a similarity between Liz Cheney's disgraceful McCarthyite attack on lawyers who defended people accused of terrorism, and the people who questioned whether or not Yoo, Bybee and others had committed crimes when they told the Bush administration that it was legal to torture.
Now, conservatives on both sides of the Liz Cheney "Al Qaeda 7" smear of the Obama Justice Department have entered Seinfeld's Bizarro World where the polar opposite of truth reigns. For the likes of David Brooks, Marc Thiessen and Amy Holmes, the Obama DOJ lawyers who defended the U.S. Constitution are no different than the Bush torture team that undermined it.
So, upholding the Constitution is comparable to ripping it up? This is the insanity that the right have been driven to whilst trying to defend the indefensible.
With a large amount of Republicans joining in the condemnation of Liz Cheney and William Kristol's disgraceful McCarthyite advert, it falls to Marc Thiessen and Fox News to attempt to defend the indefensible.
KILMEADE: First off, Marc, do you think -- do you think it's wrong to defend criminals? If you're a defense lawyer for a bad guy, whether it's Sammy the Bull or John Gotti, does that make you bad? Is that what they're doing?
THIESSEN: No, but they - I mean, well, first of all, what these people did, most of them, was not defend people who were in the criminal justice system. The sixth amendment says that if you're accused of a crime, you get to have legal representation. What these people were doing, most of them, was trying to spring terrorists out of Guantanamo who were held under the laws of war. Send them back out to the battlefield where they - where we have evidence they've killed Americans since. And one of these lawyers, Jennifer Daskal, has actually said even if we know that they will go out and kill Americans, we should still release them.
Again, Thiessen - like Liz Cheney - refuses to even acknowledge the presumption of innocence, which is a cornerstone of the American justice system. As far as he is concerned these men were battleground detainees who should never have had any trial whatsoever.
Not long after the Twin Towers fell, Dick Cheney declared the death of more than two centuries of American tradition. "It will be necessary for us to be a nation of men, and not laws," he said.
The then vice-president did his best to follow through by riding roughshod over the constitution and international laws by promoting torture, indefinite detention without trial and support for secretive military tribunals in which defendants were stripped of many of their rights.
I am stunned that after so many of the people held at Guantanamo Bay have had to be released due to a lack of evidence that there can still be people making this argument.
But that is essentially the argument that Cheney and Thiesen are still making. Anyone accused of terrorism is a terrorist and it therefore follows that anyone who defends such a person is "trying to spring terrorists from Guantanamo."
It's about as un-American a mindset as it is possible to imagine, it certainly rips up many of the laws and values which I would argue represent America's greatest strengths; and yet the people who espouse these notions consider themselves to be great patriots and, indeed, question the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with them.
“There’s something truly bizarre about this,” said Richard A. Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor and a revered figure among many members of the society. “Liz Cheney is a former student of mine — I don’t know what moves her on this thing,” he said.
But, maybe she is simply embracing her father's belief that this is a time for the US to be "a nation of men, and not laws".
I am pleased that so many Republicans also recognise this odious argument as the dangerous rubbish which it is.
Professor Epstein, however, said he found it “appalling” to see people equating work on detainee cases with a dearth of patriotism. He was a co-author of a brief in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court case argued by Neal Katyal, now the principal deputy solicitor general and a lawyer under scrutiny from Ms. Cheney’s group. The court ruled that the Bush administration’s initial plans for military commissions to try detainees violated the law.
“You don’t want to give the impression that because you oppose the government on this thing, that means you’re just one of those lefties — which I am not,” he said.
That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.
The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.
